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Awards Season: An Analysis Of The Frontrunners

With the Producers Guild awards just around the corner, it’s time to take a look at where we are in the awards season at the moment.

Firstly, I’m extremely excited for the PGAs on Saturday night, and you should be too, for the simple fact that nobody knows for sure what film is going to take home their top honor. As you know, the PGA’s winner automatically becomes the frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar because they have agreed 19 out of 26 times, including the last eight years in a row (a 100% match since both started using the preferential ballot). But what film will that be this year?

I think we can safely narrow it down to four movies that have the best chance of first taking the PGA and then Best Picture, and those films are Spotlight, The Revenant, Mad Max: Fury Road and The Big Short. At this point, a lot of you are probably screaming “Spotlight!” at your monitor, but it isn’t quite that simple. Nor is it a simple case of exchanging one frontrunner with all the required nominations for another, such as happened last year between Boyhood and Birdman.

No, this is a year in which rules will have to be broken for any of these films to win, or at the very least, a major shift in a few categories for one of them. So, let’s take them on a case by case basis to see why any of these films winning the Best Picture Oscar would be a rather surprising result.